Quick Take
Former Mentone pizza chef and accredited pizzaiolo Francesco Ramunno is opening his own restaurant in downtown Santa Cruz. At Rustico, Ramunno plans to offer Roman-style pizza and Italian street food like arancini and focaccia.
Santa Cruz County has a seemingly bottomless appetite for pizza. In addition to beloved local parlors that have endured for decades, new pizza-focused ventures come online almost monthly. Most of them favor the traditional, thin-crust, wood-fired pizza style from Naples, said to be the birthplace of pizza itself.
But Naples isn’t the only area in Italy with its own style of pizza. Just an hour’s train ride away, Rome has its own that’s distinct from its cousin to the south. It’s this pizza alla romana that chef Francesco Ramunno, who hails from southern Italy, will focus on at his new restaurant, Rustico Italian Street Food. The new restaurant is coming to the corner of Locust and Cedar streets in downtown Santa Cruz, in the former home of Planet Fresh Gourmet Burritos, in mid-February. Guests will be able to order drinks from the Redroom Cocktail Lounge next door, and customers at the bar can order off the Rustico menu. Ramunno says he plans to add more food friendly wines and beers to the list.
“Over here, everyone does the same Neapolitan style. I want to do a totally different kind of Italian restaurant,” says Ramunno, who is opening the restaurant with the help of his wife, Jerusha Adams.
Pizza alla romana is long and rectangular, and typically eaten by the slice as a snack. At Rustico Italian Street Food, Ramunno plans to offer around 10 different toppings ranging from a classic margherita to a Calabrese style with spicy ‘nduja, potatoes, caramelized onions and chilis, and a zucchini pie with stracciatella. Customers can add a gluten-free crust that he claims will be nearly indistinguishable from the gluten-full version, for an additional cost.
There will be other kinds of Italian street foods, too, including arancini, or fried rice balls, with several different fillings, and focaccia with a range of toppings. Ramunno also plans to offer panzerotto, the lesser-known southern Italian pizza that’s essentially a fried calzone.
Prices range from $10 to $15 for fried items and focaccia, $7 to $11 for pizza by the slice and $35 to $45 for whole pizzas, which each have five slices. He also plans to stock paninis, salads and other grab-and-go items for guests who want a quick meal. The restaurant will have counter service, with indoor and outdoor seating.
Ramunno graduated from Associazione Pizzerie Italiane in Rome, where he became an accredited pizzaiolo, a trained chef who specializes in making pizzas. For the past three years, he has been the pizzaiolo at Mentone in Aptos. Before that, he made pizzas for La Bufala and Tramonti in Santa Cruz, and Doppio Zero in Los Gatos.
Ramunno has always dreamed of opening his own restaurant. “It’s been his dream since he came here to open his own place, and we’ve been looking for a while,” said Adams. “This opportunity came up and it was like it felt perfect.”
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